As Trump won primary after primary in 2016, a rattled John Brennan started claiming to colleagues at the CIA that Estonia’s intelligence agency had alerted him to an intercepted phone call suggesting Putin was pouring money into the Trump campaign.

The tip was bogus, but Brennan bit on it with opportunistic relish.

Out of Brennan’s alarmist chatter about the bogus tip came an extraordinary leak to the BBC:

that Brennan had used it, along with later half-baked tips from British intelligence, as the justification to form a multi-agency spy operation (given the Orwellian designation of an “inter-agency taskforce”) on the Trump campaign, which he was running right out of CIA headquarters.

The CIA was furious about the leak, but never denied the BBC’s story. To Congress earlier this year, Brennan acknowledged the existence of the group, but cast his role in it as the mere conduit of tips about Trump-Russia collusion:

“It was well beyond my mandate as director of CIA to follow on any of those leads that involved U.S. persons. But I made sure that anything that was involving U.S. persons, including anything involving the individuals involved in the Trump campaign, was shared with the bureau.”

But if his role had truly been passive, the “inter-agency taskforce” wouldn’t have been meeting at CIA headquarters. By keeping its discussions at Langley, Brennan could keep his finger wedged in the pie. Both before and after the FBI’s official probe began in late July 2016, Brennan was bringing together into the same room at CIA headquarters a cast of Trump haters across the Obama administration whose activities he could direct – from Peter Strzok, the FBI liaison to Brennan, to the doltish Jim Clapper, Brennan’s errand boy, to an assortment of Brennan’s buddies at the Treasury Department, Justice Department, and White House.

The bogus tip from Estonia led the group into its first cock-up: sending FBI agents to sniff around the computer server connected to Trump Tower.After that effort flopped, Brennan’s group had to go back to the drawing board (on the electronic intelligence front, it had already hatched plans for national security letters and FISA warrants).

The naming of Stefan Halper as the individual sent by the FBI to spy on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election campaign has further inflamed the political warfare raging within the US state apparatus and political establishment. Halper is a long-time CIA asset with deep ties to US and British intelligence.

Published reports that the FBI had used a confidential informant to gather information on the Trump campaign led US President Donald Trump to announce via Twitter on Sunday, “I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes, and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!”

Repeating his denunciation of the year-old probe by Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is investigating alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion by the Trump campaign, as a “witch hunt,” Trump declared last week that the report of FBI spying on his campaign was a political scandal “bigger than Watergate.”…

(So the Trump team was actually colluding with Israel, not Russia. And they were ACTIVELY SEEKING to UNDERMINE the then current Obama administration on a foreign policy decision that the Israelis wanted help with. Gen. Flynn apparently asked the Russians to veto the vote on the UNSC resolution declaring Israel’s stolen lands to be illegal and the Russians refused (they ultimately voted in favor of the resolution while Obama admin abstained allowing it to be approved). Then Flynn LIED to the FBI about that request.)

UN Security Council Resolution 2334, the December 2016 anti-settlements resolution, is at the heart of the guilty plea former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn entered on Friday. Flynn is accused of making false statements about his conversations with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. One of the two statements is allegedly about the UN resolution which condemned Israel’s settlements as a “flagrant violation” of international law and which Trump’s team sought to have vetoed.

Flynn is accused of making false statements about his conversations with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergei Kislyak. One of the two statements is allegedly about the UN resolution that condemned Israel’s settlements as a “flagrant violation” of international law and which US President Donald Trump’s team sought to have vetoed…

The December 1 court filing states that “on or about December 22 (2016), Flynn did not ask the Russian Ambassador to delay the vote on or defeat a pending United Nations Security Council resolution, and that the Russian ambassador subsequently never described to Flynn Russia’s response to the request.”

The filing says Flynn misled the FBI about this, which would mean he allegedly did ask the Russian ambassador to delay the vote or defeat the resolution. He is accused of a false statement about that conversation and any subsequent Russian responses to it.

In the lead up to the anti-settlement resolution which angered Jerusalem, Trump’s team had urged the US to veto the resolution. On December 22nd Trump tweeted “the resolution being considered in the UN Security Council regarding Israel should be vetoed.” Egypt postponed the vote on December 22nd. However it passed on December 23rd with 14 in favor and the US abstaining. According to an article at Foreign Policy in February 2017 Michael Flynn played a key role attempting to scupper the UN vote. “Flynn…and other members of the president’s transition team launched a vigorous diplomatic bid to heed off a UN Security Council vote condemning Israel’s settlements.” They reached out to the UK, Egypt, Russia, Uruguay and Malaysia according to the report…